1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multilayer ceramic electronic component and a method of manufacturing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, electronic components using a ceramic material include capacitors, inductors, piezoelectric elements, varistors, thermistors, and the like.
Among ceramic electronic components, a multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) is an electronic component having advantages such as compactness, high capacitance, and ease of mounting.
Such a multilayer ceramic capacitor is a chip-type capacitor that is mounted on circuit boards of various electronic products such as display devices, such as liquid crystal displays (LCDs), plasma display panels (PDPs), and the like, computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile phones, and the like, and serves to charge electricity or discharge electricity.
A multilayer ceramic capacitor may include a plurality of dielectric layers stacked on one another, internal electrodes disposed to face one another, having the dielectric layer interposed therebetween, and external electrodes electrically connected to the internal electrodes.
Recently, as electronic products have been continually reduced in size, multilayer ceramic electronic components have also been required to be reduced in size while having higher degrees of capacitance. In accordance with this, multilayer ceramic electronic components have recently been manufactured to have thinner dielectric layers provided in greater numbers as compared with the related art electronic components.
As the dielectric layers are thinned and the number thereof is increased, however, in a ceramic body, density differences between an active region in which internal electrodes are formed and a margin portion in which no internal electrodes are formed are increased.
Such differences in density are more significant in the width direction of the product than in the length direction thereof, and in stacking and pressing processes in the manufacturing of the multilayer ceramic electronic component, interlayer-collapse may occur, such that interlayer-delamination or cracks may occur in the margin portion, and thus moisture, plating solution and foreign objects may be introduced into the product. Therefore, product reliability may be lowered.
In addition, since voltage per thickness becomes higher as the dielectric layers are thinned, there is high possibility that insulation of the dielectric layers will be broken even when a lower voltage is applied to a multilayer ceramic electronic component.
In particular, on a cross-section of the multilayer ceramic capacitor in the width-thickness direction thereof, two edges of internal electrodes in the width direction thereof are elongated during the pressing process so that they have a wedge shape, and thus the intensity of the electric field may be increased due to a notch effect.
Accordingly, high intensity electric fields are overlapped at the adjacent edges of the internal electrodes in the stacking direction, and thus, insulation of dielectric layers may be more easily broken.
Patent Document 1 relates to a multilayer ceramic capacitor, but does not disclose the following structure: first and second internal electrodes are alternately disposed to the left and to the right in the width direction so that they are offset from one another.